When I “Announced” My Pregnancy (Family, Friends, Social Media, Work)

One of the hardest things about being pregnant was figuring out when to break the news. After all, when I found out I was pregnant, I was nervous beyond belief, but also excited to share this huge life update with friends of mine who had kids or were also pregnant.

There’s a lot to factor in when you’re figuring out when to announce your pregnancy and how to prioritize who to tell first, and how. Here are the four groups of people I broke my news to, and what I thought about for each one.

Key takeaways

• Every pregnancy is different, so announcing yours should reflect your comfort and your personal situation.
• It’s OK to tell best friends (or family) whenever you want! You don’t need to use the 12-week rule just because it’s a suggested rule.
• For posting on social media, there’s no right time to do it: share your announcement on socials when you’re comfortable.
• For how and when to tell your boss you are expecting, take lots of things into consideration, like if you’re showing, as well as discrimination.

When to announce your pregnancy

Announcing pregnancy is different for everyone, and may even differ from pregnancy to pregnancy! Here is what I did to tell friends and family I was pregnant, as well as my job.

To family

With family, we did as best we could to tell parents in person, and if not in person (some parents were in other states), then on FaceTime. I did this around 12 weeks, using the “12 week rule” (about which I have mixed thoughts). Sharing pregnancy news with family is a question to discuss before your baby arrives, and we were in sync about it.

The 12 week rule is typically when people expect you to announce your pregnancy, or at least for close people in your life. Yes, I do understand it quite a bit, and I did use it for the sake of making sure I was past the risk of most miscarriage statistics before telling the whole family.

You’ll see below, in “Friends,” that I didn’t use the 12 week rule for all my friends!

To friends

What happened for me is a bit funny, because I acted out of mere surprise in sharing my “news” immediately with some very close friends who were also parents already. If you’re the first one of your friends to become pregnant, this will probably go differently for you.

Best friends

I probably have a little bit of a funny scenario with how I told my best friends. I was so shocked to see a positive pregnancy test that I texted it immediately to a few best friends to say, “Could this be a false positive?” and “What should I DO?!”

It was right for me, in my personal scenario, to have the support of those very best friends in the moments I found out I was pregnant. And it would’ve been ideal to have them as best friends in case anything difficult happened with my pregnancy in the first few weeks or months.

Next-best friends (close friends)

For my close friends, I chose to try to FaceTime them, or at least call them, as a fun way of seeing their reactions and telling them we were going to become parents. I did this a little after 13 weeks, after we had told all our immediate family and extended family.

Friends who may be having a tough time conceiving

I did have some friends who were in a tough spot with trying to conceive their first, and when working on when to break my news to them, I waited as long as I could.

Of course, I wanted to be sensitive to their fertility journey and acknowledged that this was a really trying time for them. I told these friends at a time when I felt like I had told everyone else in my life, and I didn’t want them to hear about my pregnancy from another friend. I wanted it to still come directly from me.

For friends like these, a simple text message will do. If they’re in a difficult part of their family journey like my friends were, they probably won’t want a FaceTime call, where they have to come up with a reaction on the spot.

On social media

I felt a bit vulnerable about my pregnancy, and I didn’t want it interfering with things I was doing at the time like a job search (I did manage to get a new job while pregnant).

Aside from that, I just felt like I didn’t need to post a photo of myself or a sonogram and do a big announcement until I was really ready. For me, this was around 24 weeks along, or right before Dan and I left for our babymoon trip to New England.

Luckily, I have a photographer for a husband, and we got to do a fun little maternity shoot the last week of August, as I had started really “showing” a week or two before that. Doing photo shoots was one of my favorite things about being pregnant.

I shared my maternity shoot photos on Instagram, much to do the overwhelmingly positive congratulatory remarks from lots of friends.

To you work or your boss

Sharing pregnancy news with your boss or your team at work takes all sorts of shapes and is not a one-size-fits-all equation. For announcing a pregnancy with people at work, there is even more to consider, like discrimination, judginess or lots of questions about your parental leave.

One positive thing is that you can stop trying to hide all those alcohol-free things to drink during pregnancy you’ve been having at work happy hours!

Complications aside, telling your boss about your pregnancy has to do a lot with if you have any medical challenges, morning sickness in the first trimester, or early showing that is hard to hide.

I wrote a guide on how and when to tell your boss you’re pregnant that covers tons of considerations, as well as telling the story about how I told two different bosses I was expecting.

When I told my boss

I wound up telling my boss at my former company around 5 months that I was pregnant, and at my new job, I told my boss when I was 6.5 or so months pregnant that I was expecting and would need to take leave in just 3 months.